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An Open Letter To HR Executives

There But For The Grace Of G-d Go Any One Of Us

Dear Sir/Madam,

We may not have met, but I’ve got your back. I’m on your side when it comes to using effective HRM practices and business rules to drive improved business outcomes in your organization. I know how hard it is to draw those lines of sight from needed business outcomes, like faster time to market, lower costs of higher quality customer service, greater insight into customer profitability by market segments, and greater organizational capability to support global growth, to the specifics of what HR does to improve HRM. And I know absolutely that information technology is not the answer but rather just one of the critical tools in your arsenal when it comes to attacking your toughest challenges.

Information technology can be a real power tool, providing enormous leverage when used well. Or it can cut you and your career off at the knees when mishandled. And all too often, through ignorance, benign neglect, delegation to whoever leads comp and benefits, or knee-jerk subservience to the IT powers that be, you’ve been cut off at the knees.

Help (which is just one letter off from hell, so we can’t afford to wander) is on the way. But there’s a fair amount of work ahead if you’re going to take charge of how, when, at what cost, against what objectives, with what redesigned processes, using what types of high quality data, with what governance, etc. you deploy the power tools of IT to the benefit of your firm’s effectiveness in HRM and, more importantly, to the achievement of needed business results.

First up, you need to get comfortable with the idea that technology per se is not the answer to any important business question any more than 42 is the answer to “what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?” There just aren’t simple answers to important business questions, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t answers. And where technology is concerned, driving business outcomes via effective HRM is much more about knowing what effective HRM would look like, knowing what practices applied to what parts of the organization would generate the most overall benefit. Once we understand what’s needed in HRM to drive those business outcomes, we can figure out what combination of technical tools, deployed how, with what functionality and so forth are needed to support those practices.

For many years I’ve used the metaphor of “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” to describe the thought process that takes us from well-defined business outcomes to well-defined HRM practices/organizational designs/analytics/etc. and right on to the design and delivery of the needed operational capabilities, the HRM delivery system, needed to conjure up your own Emerald City. You can read about that approach at your leisure using the links at the end of this letter.

After you’ve slogged your way through all of that, and having cured any insomnia from which you may have been suffering, I’d like to suggest that, with the help of a select team of business, HR and HR technology/delivery system leaders, you begin work ASAP to refine your HRM and HRM delivery systems strategy. But how and where do you begin this journey?

Gather all of the organizational strategy, current state HRM and HRMDS information you can find. Read it all through the lens of strategic HRM, looking for the specific impacts on business strategies and outcomes that must come from well-executed strategic HRM. See the patterns in those strategic HRM requirements and design HRM policies etc. to deliver them. Then prepare to update your HRM policies, practices, and operations to support converged HRM and HR technology.

Assign someone to inventory your current HRMDS, including all the “informal” components. What software are you using — brand/module/release – and what is it costing, including both out-of-pocket and opportunity costs? What outsourcing are you doing — provider/scope of service — and what is it costing, including both out-of-pocket and opportunity costs? What spreadsheets, Word documents, private databases, and even paper files (gulp!) are you depending on for some of your HRM processes?

Learn all you can about the differences between poor, good and great HR technology, and about what the market offers — continuous learning needed here. There’s a ton of material on my blog (here, here and here are some good starting points), and an absolute must is attendance at a major HR technology conference. I’ll be speaking (every year since it’s inception) at the big Kahuna of such conferences, HRE’s HR Technology Conference , as well as at the newer European HR Technology Conference.

Clean up your HRM data — including organization data, people data, competency models, business rules, and data granularity — to support converged HRM and converged HR technology. Start with the most important roles, organizations, KSAOCs, whatever, but you really can’t do anything decent with analytics unless your data is sufficiently reliable, granular and properly structured.

Insist upon detailed product roadmaps, with dates, against which to evaluate vendors and providers for evidence that they’re on top of converged HRM and converged HR technology — and do probe for their strategies around all eight convergence themes mentioned in the blog post on this you will have read in step #3 above.

Determine what components of your current HRMDS platform are serving you well, which are not, what needs to be upgraded/enhanced/replaced, what can remain as it is (but keep on eye on this as all components “age”). Design your future HRMDS to deliver those strategic HRM requirements and then make your HR technology decisions. Be disciplined/methodical in evaluating potential HRMDS platform component changes, or changes in people and process, and don’t be a victim of vendor “promises.” Weed out/de-emphasize vendors and providers who can’t take you to a converged future — and run away from those that don’t even know that the converged future is coming.

Do not judge the needs of tomorrow’s workforce or HRM by yesterday’s standards, but do judge your own responsibilities and their results in terms of driving business outcomes.

You obviously don’t have to do all the heavy lifting yourself; there’s a ton of staff work discussed above that’s properly delegated. But it’s important that you get just as comfortable discussing — and then making “bet the farm” decisions about the technology-enabled aspects of HRM as you’ve become (or been expected to become) discussing and making decisions about the financial aspects of HRM. And there’s not an MBA program of any substance that leaves out any of this — IT, finance, HRM, and operations management — which is why I’m so grateful for that degree.

We may not have met, but I’ve got your back. Sincerely yours, Naomi Bloom

If you feel like you’ve been stranded along the way or that we’ve (or you’ve) been off on various scenic detours, my apologies for not providing the final installment of our Yellow Brick Road travelogue as quickly as I had hoped. Life just keeps happening; we keep up as best we can. And if you’re just […]

My apologies for the long detour from the Yellow Brick Road while I attended to heavy business travel, client deliverables, more shoulder rehab, and the final business details for closing on M/V SmartyPants. More on SmartyPants in a later next post, complete with pictures. For now, we’ve got a lot more work to do along […]

In Part I of our journey down the yellow brick road to great HRM and HRM delivery systems, I set the stage in terms of the environment in which our organizations must operate and what they must do to be successful. By now you should have decided for your own organization – or will do this shortly […]

In my 2/9/2010 post, I announced that I would be publishing my strategic HRM delivery systems planning methodology on this blog, so I thought I’d better get started. Although there’s a very geeky set of materials to guide me on these projects, I call the version of my methodology intended for clients, “follow the yellow […]

15 comments to An Open Letter To HR Executives

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It’s such a “Naomi Moment,” that a normal, un-tech-focused HR pro at a cabinet company in Texas, HR Metrics God Jack Fitz-Enz, a bleeding-edge HR marketing consultant like William Tincup, and an HR vendor blogger all have the same ALL CAPS response to your dense, informative post.

This is SUPER helpful, in a practical sense.

I’m looking at HRIS options and working hard to gauge the value of potential HR Tech platforms for our organization. This series of posts both give me practical guideposts for thinking this through, and give me the business framework to help my CEO and CFO understand the value of a strong, deeply integrated HRIS to cutting costs and, potentially, increasing revenue.

Franny, I so hope that more HR leaders, like you, will tune in and turn on. What they do matters so very much, and it’s just critical that they take charge of how technology can help (or hurt) what they’re doing so that they aren’t overtaken by others. Thanks again for investing your time with me.

I’m a little behind with my thanks, but your feedback is very much appreciated. I don’t know how some people do it, but I find that this type of writing really does take time to think it through and then write what I want to say as cogently as possible.

NAOMI, YOU’VE NAILED IT AGAIN. JUST AS TECHNOLOGY IS NOT THE ANSWER, NEITHER ARE METRICS. I’M WORKING WITH A GROUP NOW THAT ARE CONSTANTLY ASKING WHAT SHOULD I MEASURE? METRICS ARE USELESS UNTIL YOU ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS….JUST AS YOU SUGGEST WITH TECHONOLOGY. I HEAR THERE IS A NEW BOOK, THINKING FAST AND SLOW (?) THAT CLAIMS MOST PEOPLE JUST SEE AND REACT (FAST) RATHER THAN GATHER DATA AND CONSIDER (SLOW). I’VE ALWAYS SAID PEOPLE DON’T LIKE TO THINK. IT MAKES THEIR HEADS HURT. WHAT IS A BODY TO DO?
JAC

Jac, I so appreciate your thoughts on this — as I did Leo’s below. Thinking is hard work, and you can’t do it while time-sharing your brain across several other tasks. But thinking clearly and strategically about how effective HRM drives business outcomes is essential if we’re going to make progress here.

You really nailed it with, “And where technology is concerned, driving business outcomes via effective HRM is much more about knowing what effective HRM would look like, knowing what practices applied to what parts of the organization would generate the most overall benefit.”